Today: Making a browser fast, the story of Firefox Quantum.
summary
Browser architecture gets rewritten for parallelism: Servo prototypes in Rust validate parallel styling, then Stylo in Firefox 57 ships a multithreaded style engine; compositor moves to GPU (2016) and is sandboxed to avoid driver crashes; rasterization is moved off the main thread with off-main-thread painting in Firefox 58; synchronous IPC like cookie access is eliminated — a cookie rewrite cuts blocking time by about a second on heavy sites; garbage collection becomes incremental; overall result is measurable frame and responsiveness wins.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:43How a computer works
- 4:09Browser is a user agent
- 4:41How does a browser work
- 9:02Problems
- 9:43Quantum LA
- 11:18Rust on Style
- 12:05Integration
- 14:20Even handlers
- 15:44Compositing
- 17:34Painting
- 19:30Prioritize
- 20:48Crawling
- 21:36IPC
- 23:45Garbage Collection
- 24:30Timers
- 25:08Background tabs
- 25:42Animation
- 26:04User Interface
- 26:15New Engine
- 26:30Conclusion
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